Water Woes

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers couldn't possibly have chosen a worse time to announce plans to keep Lake Okeechobee's levels about a foot lower than normal year round, to protect against a catastrophic breach of its aging dike.

If Army Corps officials had looked out their helicopter window, they'd have seen South Florida's backup water supply so parched, its cracked, black bottom is laying bare ancient Indian artifacts. At such historic lows, it's hard for many to even fathom a time when the lake will once again be flush with water, and experts say it may take years for it to return to its old levels.

When it does, the region can only hope the corps will pull its head out of the muck and see the danger in its plan to tamper with the lake's levels to a dangerous degree. The Army Corps' plan would only exacerbate the threat posed by droughts like this one, leaving less water available to replenish underwater drinking supplies and refill irrigation canals.

The Army Corps does have well-founded concerns about the deteriorating infrastructure of the Herbert Hoover Dike, whose earthen walls are so vulnerable to rupture that a water management district study said it posed a "grave and imminent danger" to the 40,000 people living nearby. The solution, though, is not to stick with a level-tampering system that threatens other key sectors, namely the agricultural industry that helps prop up the state's economy and the water supply that feeds the entire South Florida region.

The answer, instead, is for the Army Corps, and the federal government funding it, to take advantage of the lake's low levels and expedite essential repairs to the dike. That would require the Army Corps, which has a poor track record of repairing New Orleans' levees, to toss out a timeline estimating repairs to high-risk areas to be complete by 2017 and the entire dike to be fixed by 2025, and work with some urgency.

There's no excuse to take that long to respond to life-threatening concerns, especially if it means leaning on other threatening tactics to buy time.